When a courier for the powerful crime family descended from Niccolò Machiavelli realizes he's being followed by a rival family assassin, he takes a detour through the English countryside to shake his pursuer. He manages to hide his precious cargo—a fortune in blood diamonds from Sierra Leone—before his pursuer collides with an English family on a holiday drive. The courier drowns in a swollen river; the mother and son die in the crash. The father is emotionally devastated, and retires in despair from his MI5 cipher career.Five years later, the head of the Machiavelli crime family, Alberto Lorente, is still in pursuit of his missing diamonds and is ready to launch an ambitious scheme to recover them. What follows is a twisted trail of murder, kidnapping and layers upon layers of subterfuge.

The British Security Services are seriously compromised, but no one knows how or by whom. And suddenly, our former MI5 cipher expert is on everyone's shopping list.